Spend any time in a newsroom and you quickly realise that news publishers are built for production, not adaptation. Every editorial system supports smooth, regular publishing and the culture is built around fairly rigid deadlines, norms and traditions. These are design features, not bugs. But they also make transformation — digital, cultural, or otherwise — extremely difficult.
The latest Table Stakes Europe report said as much when published earlier this year. Reflecting on five years of supporting publishers to become digital and audience-first organisations, it reiterated the ongoing challenge of getting journalists to shift behaviours:
“Today, the environment and the markets are constantly changing. As is the business model. The only way to keep up is to scrutinise your strategies and processes constantly. It’s a hard lesson but necessary. Once you have learned it, it will become easier and easier."
I saw that first-hand during my eight years at The Times and The Sunday Times, where I led the audience development team that ran the newsroom’s content distribution efforts. This included producing newsletters, running social media channels, leading on SEO strategy and measuring the performance of stories.
Over time, with the success of our distribution contingent upon what content was commissioned, the team started working further upstream alongside the section editors and the journalists who made the decisions on what was published. This involved equipping them with audience insights and data about what stories drove registrations, subscriptions or traffic. Ultimately, our role evolved into empowering editors and reporters with the insights they needed to make smarter editorial choices (not to mention, make them look good in front of the editor-in-chief).
In doing so, we began to ask deeper questions about how the newsroom worked, why it valued certain types of stories over others and whether longstanding processes — everything from news conference times to the publishing schedule to the sub-editing rota — made sense in a world where digital subscriptions were the fastest growing revenue stream, and print was in decline.
That’s not easy in any newsroom but it proved especially challenging in a legacy paper that had been publishing since 1785, had a globally recognised brand and was widely perceived as a success story for online paid journalism.
Without a step-by-step guide to follow, it was slow, hard work for the audience development team and for the wider digital team within which we operated.
Four steps to change
Almost without realising it, we developed a four-step playbook for audience-first newsroom transformation. The stages — designed to be repeated as often as necessary — offer a practical guide for making small, incremental changes, even if not every attempt lasts.
- Identify and Empower Change Agents:
Start by finding digitally fluent, audience-centric and curious team members who can execute on your strategy. These people will often be new hires or emerging talent in the newsroom who merit time and space to innovate. But they can also be experienced staff who command respect across the newsroom, view the change as important and can act as “power brokers” to bring colleagues along with them.
The change agents should be given a clear mandate and a 101 class in change management — and they should know that pushback is part of the process. Introduce them to key newsroom editors and reporters and explain how they will help each other with their goals, whether that’s getting scoops or increasing the audience. When obstacles appear in their path — for example, editors pushing back on new ways of doing things — help to clear their way by having frank, open conversations about the reasoning for their reluctance to try something new. - Equip Them With The Right Data:
Newsrooms have historically relied on intuition but data-driven organisations tend to make better decisions. So provide audience demographic and behavioural data, on top of content data, that allows the changemakers to challenge assumptions about “who the audience is” and “what works and doesn’t work”. If customer data is hard to come by, draft data analysts into the newsroom and encourage them to collaborate with desk editors.
Beware that editors might use data to justify their decisions after the fact so always provide context (e.g. "the story was successful but in part because it was on the homepage for the busiest part of the day”). Focus your efforts on either optimising the worst-performing content and engaging the least-engaged users or directing effort from lower-performing areas into the topics, formats and publication styles that work. This will give you wins that you can share with the wider newsroom to generate excitement and momentum. - Experiment with Content Commissioning:
Editors get a buzz from telling stories in new ways or stories that have never been heard before, so help them do that. Trial limited-run newsletters and podcasts — but kill them if they fail to reach an agreed audience threshold after a set time.
Conduct a user needs assessment for a sceptical section editor that demonstrates which articles drive particular outcomes (e.g. “first-person features about health or personal relationships don’t perform strongly for unregistered audiences but convert registered users at a higher rate than others”). Even something as simple as moving a monthly planning meeting or involving different personnel in that session can improve output and build trust with editors. - Embed New Skills Across the Newsroom:
It’s not enough to have a small group of digital, audience-centric experts; the whole newsroom needs to think that way. Build capacity across the newsroom by exposing all roles — including art/graphics teams and subeditors — in both the “why” (the business or strategic rationale for doing something different) and the “how” (ways that individuals can contribute).
Explore job swaps or reverse mentoring, where junior team members share skills or techniques with more senior editors, as well as informal “lunch and learn” training sessions run by people across the newsroom; these can help build camaraderie. It is a proven fact too that there is always going to be attendance at training with lunch on offer. In-person town halls and celebratory all-hands emails from senior editors can also expose staff to innovative projects they might not have otherwise come across amidst the hectic nature of daily deadlines.
We had some wins that I like to think paved the way for the company’s financial turnaround. But, naturally, not everything worked. Some ideas never got off the ground. Some projects stalled. At times, we failed to get buy-in or misjudged how change would land. But the four-part game plan helped us recover from those. Each time, we sought out new people in the newsroom who were willing to experiment and try something different, and we followed the steps again.
Where to start?
Anita Zielina put it nicely at this year’s International Journalism Festival in Perugia when she said: "I totally failed sometimes to identify the people who actually were powerful and to stakeholder manage them." Understanding who holds influence — formal and informal — is one of the most important things you can do in those early stages of a newsroom change.
Yes, get the senior editors on board but don’t underestimate staff with long tenures, who know everyone by name and are well-liked, and staff that don’t produce content but spend lots of time in the newsroom, such as managing editors or desk managers. They might be harder to recruit to your guiding coalition, but their experience and expertise will pay dividends when getting others on board.
The game plan isn’t magic, but it is a pragmatic framework that had some success as my team sought to transition a 200-year-old newsroom through one of its most significant periods of transformation. If you find yourself in a similar position or simply have reflections from your own journey, my colleague Lisa (who is a veteran in newsroom transformation) and I would love to hear from you.
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